Real-Time Service-Oriented Architectures to Support Remote Critical Care: Trends and Challenges

Healthcare providers and governments are under pressure to maintain and improve the quality of care to an increasing volume of critical care patients at either end of the life cycle, namely premature and ill-term babies together with the elderly. The provision of a service of critical care utilizing real-time service- oriented architectures has the potential to enable clinicians to be supported in the care of a greater number patients that are, perhaps more importantly, located elsewhere to their intensive care units. This paper presents a review of recent research in the application of computing and IT to support the service of critical care and determines the trends and challenges for the application of real-time service- oriented architectures within the domain.